Of course I told Barbara all about it—­it is best to establish your wife in the habit of thinking you tell her everything—­and she was more than usually gentle to Jaffery.  We carried him down with us to Northlands that afternoon, calling at his club for a suit-case.  In the car he tucked a very tired and comfort-desiring Susan in the shelter of his great arm.  There was something pathetically tender in the gathering of the child to him.  Barbara with her delicate woman’s sense felt the harmonics of chords swept within him.  And when we reached home and were alone together, she said with tears very near her eyes: 

“Poor old Jaff.  What a waste of a life!”

“My dear,” I replied, “so said Doria.  But you speak with the tongue of an angel, whereas Doria, I’m afraid, is still earth-bound.”

The tear fell with a laugh.  She touched my cheek with her hand.

“When you’re intelligent like that,” she said, “I really love you.”

For a mere man to be certified by Barbara as intelligent is praise indeed.

“I wonder,” she said, a little later, “whether those two are going to be happy?”

“As happy,” said I, “as a mutual admiration society of two people can possibly be.”

She rebuked me for a tinge of cynicism in my estimate.  They were both of them dears and the marriage was genuine Heaven-made goods.  I avowed absolute agreement.

“But what would have happened,” she said reflectively, “if Jaffery had come along first and there had been no question of Adrian.  Would they have been happy?”

Then I found my opportunity.  “Woman,” said I, “aren’t you satisfied?  You have made one match—­you, and you’ll pardon me for saying so, not Heaven—­and now you want to unmake it and make a brand-new hypothetical one.”

“All your talk,” she said, “doesn’t help poor Jaffery.”

I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain, kissed her and retired to my dressing-room.  Barbara smiled, conscious of triumph over me.

During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the part of Jaffery’s fairy mother.  She discussed his homelessness—­she had an eerie way of treading on delicate ground.  A bed in a tent or a club or an inn.  That was his home.  He had no possessions.

“Good Lord!” cried Jaffery.  “I should think I have.  I’ve got about three hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London Repository, to say nothing of skins and as fine a collection of modern weapons as you ever saw.  I could furnish a place in slap-up style to-morrow.”

“But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a dinner plate or a fork?”

“Thousands, my dear,” said Jaffery.  “They’re waiting to be called for in all the shops of London.”

He laughed his great laugh at Barbara’s momentary discomfiture.  I laughed too, for he had scored a point.  When a man has, say, a thousand pounds wherewith to buy that much money’s worth of household clutter, he certainly is that household clutter’s potential owner.  Between us we developed this incontrovertible proposition.